During my second semester at Yale Law School, I carried around the letters of a dead man. I began to think of them as small pieces of the prison cells that once held him. The letters were from Glenn McGinnis-executed on January 25, 2000, for the murder of Leta Wilkerson. A tempest, the letters conveyed every emotion but fear. In time the one-sided correspondence came to symbolize my own terror: that prison would be the shadow I carried until my death. That semester I took Professor Stephen Bright's capital punishment course. Before then, my knowledge of death row consisted of McGinnis's letters and a story from my time at Sussex 1 State Prison. From the pull-up bar, I couldn't help but hear a young man, new to the compound, talking to a friend locked in a cell that faced the yard. The window in the cell was no wider than the palm of a hand, no longer than the length of a tall man's arm. I watched them trying to communicate. They weren't talking as much as yelling and reading each other's lips. The new guy asked his friend when he was getting out. The response: I'm on death row.
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